


what i own

by maryabolkonskaya



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: M/M, for a grade, there's also a guy named nathaniel whom i added for Gayness, this was a thing i turned into a teacher
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-08-14 13:26:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8015692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maryabolkonskaya/pseuds/maryabolkonskaya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is how John’s entire life has been, on a battlefield between what he wants and what everyone, even society, wants of him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what i own

**Author's Note:**

> i had to write a short story for la 1 honors and, of course, i wrote gay lams
> 
> you should not be surprised

John Laurens, thirteen years old, is sitting in the front pew of The King’s Church, running his hand absentmindedly across the wood grain armrest as his father, Henry Laurens, preaches from the pew in the front about something John doesn’t quite understand. John catches random words here and there, words like “sodomists”, or “hell”, or “sinful”, and they stick out like ink on sheep’s wool. John tries to put the words together in his head, and begins to tap his fingers on the armrest in an uneven pattern, earning a disapproving glance from his mother, Eleanor, who is sitting beside him. She reaches across his lap and holds her hand on top of his, fixing him with a pointed glare, and John folds his hands in his lap begrudgingly. This is how John’s entire life has been, on a battlefield between what he wants and what everyone, even society, wants of him.

Henry Laurens steps away from the pew, bows humbly, and the congregation politely claps. John claps as well, smiling at his father as he sits down next to Eleanor. The prayer leader steps up to the pew, the light from the large window illuminating him from behind, and John bows his head in sync with his family, but sneaks a glance at the boy sitting in the pew across from them. His name is Nathaniel Carter, and his family attends church every Sunday just like the Laurens’. John takes a second to admire the boy, the way his freckles are splattered across his nose and the apples of his cheeks, or the blonde of his hair. Eleanor squeezes his hand as the man behind the pew prays, and John wishes he could look at the boy more, but closes his eyes and hears his mother hum in satisfaction.

Service is over, and of course the Laurens’ don’t leave immediately. His mother must talk to her friends, and his father must shake hands with practically every man in the congregation. John doesn’t understand this mingling of people for nearly thirty minutes after service has ended, but he smiles and allows his mother’s friends to pinch his cheeks, exclaiming with laughter, “Oh, how much you have grown!” even though he saw them a week ago and he can’t have possibly grown that much in seven days. Eventually the mingling dies down, and the families head their separate ways to enjoy a nice Sunday lunch. John waves at Nathaniel as they leave, and Nathaniel waves back, grinning. John blushes, smiling back as Eleanor tugs on his hand, pulling him through the door.

Back at home, a slave pours some more milk into John’s glass as his father boasts from across the table about how well his sermon went. He does this every Sunday, like clockwork, and John thinks it’s odd that his father brags so much, but doesn’t comment on it. John, suddenly distracted by the repeating pattern of the lace on the edge of the table cloth, misses his father’s voice addressing him, and only looks up when his father slams a closed fist onto the table, shaking John’s and everyone else’s glasses. He looks up, embarrassed, and asks his father to repeat the question, adding a “sir” at the end. His father repeats the question, and, more focused now, John understands. His father is asking him what he learned today.

“I’m not sure what all the words meant, sir, but it was something about sodomists, who are sinners, going to hell.” John’s voice raises a little at the end, making his statement sound more like a question. His father nods approvingly, Eleanor giving John an encouraging smile from across the table, and launches into another one of his boasts.

“Yes, yes, that’s the general idea of what I preached about today, Jack.” John knows that “Jack” is a nickname for John, but he thinks his name is just fine. “You see, son, sodomists are,” his father pauses, then laughs, and, more quietly, says to John’s mother, “wait, why am I telling him this now? I’ll tell him later.” Eleanor nods, and John thinks it’s funny that they think he can’t hear them. He’s not deaf, after all. Still, John ignores them and pretends like everything they’re saying is going in one ear and out the other.

 

The next day, John Laurens laughs as Nathaniel’s carefully constructed tower topples to the carpet. Nathaniel pouts for a moment, then starts picking up the wooden blocks and stacking them up again. Henry Laurens is sitting at his desk in the Laurens’ family living room, and has been watching the two boys for half an hour. Occasionally he will turn back around in his chair and scratch a sentence or two onto a letter for his friend, Nicholas David. John, after watching Nathaniel for a moment, begins to help him rebuild his tower, and Henry turns around, writing to Nicholas that “Jack has taken no notice of any of the young ladies, but that’s no reason to worry; nature will take its course.”

John, noticing his father is distracted, grabs Nathaniel’s hand and gives it a quick squeeze. It sends a small shock through John’s arm, up to his heart, and a sense of satisfaction settles in his gut. He’d been wanting to do that for weeks. Nathaniel looks startled for a moment, but smiles gently, squeezing back. John hears his father’s chair squeaking as he turns around to look at the boys, and doesn’t think twice about continuing to hold Nathaniel’s hand. John regrets this decision as soon as his father’s eyes lay on their enfolded hands. They narrow, like a cat sizing up its prey, and anger flares in them like a blazing fire. Nathaniel and John both pull their hands away at the same time, the fleeting satisfaction leaving along with their embrace.

“Nathaniel, I need to talk to John. Find something else to do,” Henry says, voice controlled but on the verge of overflowing into yelling and screaming.

“But, Dad,” John starts, but is silenced by the look Henry gives him. He huffs, slumping where he is cross-legged on the ground. Nathaniel gets up quickly, looking back at John before leaving the room, giving him a sorry smile. John, as soon as Nathaniel has left, begins speaking, “Dad, I was just-”

“Sodomists,” Henry begins, cutting off John’s complaining before it got out of hand. “Sodomists are,” Henry pauses, thinking of a way to put it lightly, “men who love other men. Sodomists can be other things, of course, but,” another pause, Henry turns to scribble something on his letter to Nicholas, “that’s unimportant,” he finishes, turning back around in the chair, looking at John. “Does that make sense?”

John tilts his face, frowns, and furrows his eyebrows. “Why is being a sodomist bad?”  
“Because God says so.” Henry says, sounding like he wants this conversation to end sooner rather than later. He stands up, abandoning his letter, and leaves the room.

John sits on the floor, surrounded by wooden blocks, and mulls over what his father has just told him. What could be wrong with loving people? John doesn’t know, and decides that it’s not important. He pushes the thoughts out of his mind, and stands, walking out of the room after his father. Maybe Nathaniel is still here and they can play some more.

 

John Laurens, twenty-two years old, sits at the desk of an inn in London. The whistling November air can be heard through the window above the desk as he writes a letter to Nathaniel. They’ve managed to stay in contact, even though John is becoming a lawyer all the way across the sea in England and Nathaniel is fighting in Philadelphia with the Continental Army and General Washington. John is writing to Nathaniel about his wife, Martha Manning, and how much he regrets their marriage. “It is a marriage formed from pity on my part,” John writes, referring to how he impregnated Martha a couple of months previous. Sex outside of marriage is not widely accepted, and John knows what would happen to Martha if word got out what she had done. He also married Martha in the hopes that it would shut up his father’s nagging about John snagging a wife. Martha is a nice girl, and John thinks he’ll be able to call her his wife without too much nausea. He’ll never tell her who he really is, no, but she doesn’t _need_ to know. Nobody needs to know.

John is startled out of his thoughts by a bird running into his window. He looks up, quickly enough to see a bright yellow bird slowly fly away from his room’s window. John smiles and gets back to his letter, thoughts of Nathaniel swirling in his mind like a hurricane. He decides to write to Nathaniel about how much he also regrets he cannot be fighting with his friend, as his father demands he finish earning his law degree. John would ignore his father and leave Europe if he could, join the army with his fellow young men, but he has no way to leave Europe, as his father pays for his education and everything he owns. It frustrates John, letting his father win, but sacrifices must be made.

 

John Laurens, twenty-three years old, walks up to General Washington’s camp with other new recruits, heart thumping like a hummingbird. It’s because he’s nervous, or maybe because he sees the men being carried around on stretchers, moaning and groaning in pain, blood blossoming from wounds on their legs, arms, or even their heads. John focuses his attention back on the man leading them around the camp - his name is Hercules, he told them when they arrived. John tries to calm himself by focusing on the sky and making shapes out of the clouds. He sees a face, a turtle, even a horse-looking shape, before they reach another group of men standing in front of a battered tent. One of them, in a neat powdered wig, has a pointed chin, another with his red-brown hair in a ponytail at the nape of his neck. They’re standing between a tall man, an air of command surrounding him, and John isn’t sure who they are, but feels an immediate bond with them, specifically the red-brown haired man.

Hercules stops them in front of the men, gesturing dramatically as he introduces each of them. “This,” Hercules says, pointing to the pointy-chinned man, “is the Marquis de Lafayette. Don’t even ask for his full name.” The men laugh, the mood lightening significantly. “He,” the red-brown haired man, “is Alexander Hamilton.” John’s heart jumps at the smile Alexander flashes the crowd of young men, and tries desperately to calm himself. He nearly misses Hercules’ introduction of the man in the middle, “Our general, George Washington,” and his instructions afterwards, to split into two groups, one with Lafayette, one with Alexander. John immediately rushes to Alexander’s side, tripping on a stick in his haste, but is caught by the handsome young man.

“Be careful there, good sir,” Alexander says as soon as John is back on his feet. “Wouldn't want to ruin a face as pretty as yours,” he says more quietly. John blushes, mumbles out a “thank you”, and hurries to stand with the other men behind Alexander. Hercules instructs them to tour the men around camp and show them to their tents. Alexander commands the men to follow him, gesturing for John to come up front with him. John rushes forwards, almost clumsily, and adheres himself to Alexander’s side. “So,” Alexander starts, “what’s your name, man?”

“John. Laurens,” he adds as an afterthought. Alexander laughs - it’s a sweet laugh, like honey - and looks behind himself to scold any stragglers of their group. As soon as he turns back to John, John knows that he will be the death of him - the flow of his hair down to his neck, the sharp line of his jaw, stinging blue eyes - and John doesn’t entirely mind.

As Alexander begins to tell the group about how things work around camp, John gazes up at the sky again, only seeing hearts in the pillow soft clouds overhead.

 

And so the experiment begins. John and Alexander hold hands underneath the table as Washington goes on about their newest strategies, or kiss after dark when everyone else in their tent is asleep. John is surprised no one has caught them, if the looks Alexander casts him throughout the day are any kind of giveaway. Even Lafayette, the only person John and Alexander talk to as much as each other, hasn’t caught on, and he’s nearly caught them a few times. Like the time when Alexander had been on his knees between John’s legs at nearly three o'clock in the morning and Lafayette had woken up in a fit, having had some dream about his wife, Adrienne, dying. Alexander had quickly stood up, John buckling his pants, and together they made some excuse to Lafayette along the lines of, “John’s pants had a rip in them and he wanted Alexander to see if he could fix it.” Lafayette, still half-asleep, had mumbled some reply, and promptly laid back down in bed.

That was the closest they’d come to getting caught, and it nearly made John want to stop what they were doing before it got out of hand. Nevertheless, John had let Alexander hold him as he cried the next night, panicking about being found out, or worse, being killed. Alexander had planted soft kisses into John’s hair, trailing down to his ear, and finally to his lips.

John let Alexander do all these scandalous - absolutely _scandalous_ \- things to him, and if he didn’t completely mind, if Alexander made the idea of going back to Martha sound absolutely disgusting, so be it.

 

John Laurens, twenty-seven years old, and his men are sitting in a tight-packed group behind a tree, waiting for either the redcoats on the other side of the clearing to engage, or for the signal from John to fire. They’ve been stuck here since the morning, and John can tell the men are beginning to get frustrated.

John, in his mind, has been fighting his own battle. One between himself and seemingly everyone around him. He would say that Alexander was the exception, but even he had left John for a wife and kid back in New York. John was truly and utterly alone, again the ink on sheep’s wool.

John reflected on his life as he shifted from foot to foot, leaves crunching quietly under him. He reflected on his father’s warning of sodomists going to hell, of the way people whisper in the street when men holding hands walk past them, of the rumour that General Washington had sent two men out of camp for being in a relationship.

John reflected then on Alexander Hamilton, of his too-wide smile, his red-brown hair, his calm, tender words, whispered to John in the dark as they lay together on Alexander’s too-small cot, of his confidence in situations where most men would cower. Then, of Alexander’s wife, Eliza, and how she was everything John could never be. She was everything John could never be, not because she was smarter, or more beautiful, or had more money, no, because she was a women.

John was fighting a battle who he was and what society wanted him to be, and, in his head, John knew who would win. He knew that he could never be who he was, could never be with a man as he was supposed to be with a women, could never fully be John Laurens.

“Fire!” John called out harshly, startling his men into action. John ran from behind the tree, arms spread wide, ignoring the tears threatening to spill from his eyes, and cried out as a bullet struck his shoulder. Another one hit his hip and he fell, wincing and screaming as one of his men stomped on his hand. The whiz of bullets overhead John stung his ears, but he was spared the boom of a British cannon as a blackness spread over John’s vision like a sheet, pulse dying and fading away.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!!! this was probably super bad bc i couldn't use any of their letters as my teacher wouldn't let me (@ teacher: let me have The Gay Letters) but WHATEVER


End file.
